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Why We Do It: Rethinking Sex and the Selfish Gene

by Niles Eldredge

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. 224 pages.

Assaulting evolutionary psychology at one of its apparent strongholds — sexuality — Eldredge argues that life is not wholly driven by the gene's need to replicate itself. At least as important, he contends, is staying alive: he writes, "Sex is so clearly separated from pure reproduction in humans — and there is so much interplay between sex and economics, and even between economics and reproduction in human life — that this 'human triangle' of sex, reproduction, and economics makes us the very least likely creatures on the planet to conform to ... evolutionary determinism." Eldredge is curator in the Department of Invertebrates at The American Museum of Natural History and a Supporter of NCSE.